McCain Campaign Uses Web Spider to Sting Obama

By Sarah Lai Stirland

July 16, Wired

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.Mccain_obama_versionaista

John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

The service, which launched two months ago, allows users to track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis, depending on the level of filtering requested, says Peter Bray, its creator in Portland, Oregon.

"I'm an avid reader of blogs, so I thought this would be a good tool for campaigns and activists," he says. "This could be a good tool in their arsenal. "

Bray says that he got the idea from Wikipedia, which shows people the changes made to its entries. Versionista is a subscription service and allows people to track minute, detailed changes on websites.

Back in November, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was launching "Flipper TV," an online and offline effort that pools hours and hours of raw campaign trail footage filmed by individuals armed with digital cameras. The trackers attend Republican events in order to catch candidates making a statement that might contradict another on the same subject to a different audience.

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image from wired.com